How it works:
Type in your favorite restaurants (or use our location finder to discover nearby spots)
You and your partner each swipe right on places you’d eat at, left on ones you wouldn’t.
We show you where your choices match.
And for those couples whose therapist told them to add more adventure into their lives, just hit “Spin the Wheel” and let fate decide.
Things we learned from the thing:
Watch how people use your product. We learned a bunch of stuff:
Initially we had the text field for people to add their own spots. But as soon as we added a zip code field, users pretty much only use that.
We added a big bold button to swipe, and yet somehow everyone was hitting the spin button below. We had to change the language and add an icon before anyone would click the primary button.
We did not do enough explaining about what it was at first! We ended up adding a modal because no one was reading the copy. Don’t assume people read your microcopy.
You can build apps without a database. When we’re building a thing to learn, we want to build as little as possible so you can move as fast as possible. Instead of standing up a database we just persisted state to URL params. You just share URLs or hand someone your phone.
We might ultimately refactor this and make it a formal app. But just like we tell clients, figure out if people want the thing before you over-engineer it.
Google Places has bad taste in restaurants. It keeps telling me to take my wife to “Spike’s Junkyard Dogs.” We sent the site to one of our favorite little user testing services, UserBob, and we saw... SO MUCH APPLEBEE’S. We had to tinker a ton with the API to get any reasonable answers.
We might be onto something. Usually when you show people a thing you get shrugs or a “that’s nice”, or a “what is this?” The first thing everyone does with this is request features. That’s a good sign.
